Dare To Play

Abstract

Inspired by watching a group of children playing freely during their summer holidays, in this essay I am drawing parallels between the activities of playing and improvisation with learning and participatory action in our relational contexts. I am looking at improvisational participatory activity as key to learning, development and growth. Through the mentioning of the four stages of competence model, I am discussing how “mathematising” expert knowledge and competence in terms of stages of advancement, evaluation measures and de-contextualised accounting systems, may weaken our abilities for intuitive, spontaneous improvisations in our relational activities and restrict learning from within the doing and development of practice knowledge.